Jane Lawless Mysteries by Ellen Hart

Slightly OTT old-fashioned mystery books with gay characters dotted throughout. A larger than life attention-seeking theatre director and a born-to-sleuth restaurant owner (buddies, not a couple) go solving crime in swanky and artistic places in the Twin Cities and sometimes pop out to the summer house by the lake.

These books belong to an older generation, and are a light but intriguing read. Even when characters are in relationships, I’m not sure they even kiss in public. It’s ALL about the mystery.

There is always a cast list at the front of the book, so you can put it down and pick it up and not get confused. One assumes that Ellen Hart is writing for an older audience. And for the youngsters, a healthy dose of history from decades before civil partnership was a possibility – it wasn’t that many years ago that being in a lesbian relationship actually could have led to you being murdered in a sorority house, and your lover could only phone up and say she’s a ‘friend’ and worried you didn’t call her when you said you would.

Amazon link (Outdoors Type note: Be warned, though. These are very cheap but also very badly produced as ebooks – they’ve obviously been scanned in and not proofread at all. e.g. One of the books has a whole gag about what one of the characters is called that makes no sense because all the versions of it in the ebook are written the same.)